Template talk:Green Lantern RR
Overhaul justification and concerns The existing template was a bit... weird, frankly. For one thing, it wasn't really organized in any obvious way. It wasn't chronological or alphabetical, and I don't think you could even argue it was even sorted by significance. Sure, putting the plain old "Green Lantern" volumes at the top makes sense... but, then, why was listed beneath backup feature comics like and ? And there were just a number of odd omissions: why was and listed, but not ? Why but not ? Why any of the above but not or ? Why include both volumes of Emerald Dawn, but no other limited series like ? I figured the template needed a bit of an overhaul, but I could see two possible ways of doing it. The first would be to trim it down and only include obvious "flagship" titles. That would eliminate some obvious entries, like the backup/anthology features in The Flash and Action Comics Weekly. But I was concerned that it's not always such an easy call. If you had to pick out a "flagship" Green Lantern book for the New 52, the obvious choice would be ... but do we really want to cut out and ? And, once you get into the Rebirth years, I'm not even sure you can identify either or as the "main" GL book. For that reason, I decided to go as all-inclusive as I could. Include as the original "home" of the character. Include all of the series I could identify as ever being published by DC. Split out the ongoings from the limited series, and arrange everything chronologically by publication. But I'm not wedded to this approach, by any means. I think the old template was a bit of a mess, but if anyone feels strongly that my revision is too verbose or confusing or whatever, feel free to tweak or completely overhaul as you see fit. Not that anyone needs my permission to do that, of course. —Seancdaug (talk) 19:01, April 11, 2019 (UTC) :A decent point was raised about my attempt doing horrible things vis-a-vis SEO. I hadn't been thinking specifically in that direction, but it certainly falls within my "too verbose" concern. I'm glad some of the earlier cruft was removed in the reversion, but I'm still a little confused about the sorting issues, and what does and does not get included. I can get leaving out things like , since it was arguably only Green Lantern-adjacent (though was it less relevant than Sinestro, Larfleeze, or the Red Lantern Corps?), but why no Green Lantern: Mosaic or Green Lantern Corps Quarterly, both of which were ongoing series with decent length runs? It would be nice to get some actual discussion going: I don't want to upset the apple cart for its own sake, and (as I implied before) I wasn't fully onboard with my earlier take in the first place, but one of the major issues I had with the wiki that prompted me to start contributing was poor navigation, and I'd love it if we could shine some light on that and (ideally) figure out a more consistent approach. Which, I hasten to add, doesn't mean that the end result needs to be any wordier than what we have now. Or even any different at all, technically. I'm more interested in understanding why than making change for change's sake. —Seancdaug (talk) 19:57, April 11, 2019 (UTC) Spitballing other possibilities, how about something like this? Keeps the size down but still retains most of the information * Green Lantern Recommended Reading ** Green Lantern: Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3, Volume 4, Volume 5 ** Green Lantern Corps: Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3, Quarterly ** ** ** ** ** ** ** Related titles: *** *** *** *** Any thoughts? Suggestions? —Seancdaug (talk) 20:06, April 11, 2019 (UTC) :Eh, I actually like the latest revision of the template more than this. Short, sweet, and to the point. I think it would be useful to have a proper list of GL books somewhere (the category is useful, but lacks organization or context), but I don't think it needs to be at the bottom of every page. I'm not sure where it does belong (category page headers don't seem to be done, and I can't think of an obvious place for it), though. Hmm. —Seancdaug (talk) 20:13, April 11, 2019 (UTC) :Short version of how this was explained to me: *Google scrapes things. Notices a lot of pages - especially empty ones - are largely the same content: a longass bullet point. If it's around 80% of content on a page, the page is counted as a duplicate page and ignored. *The duplicate page is piled on the trash with the other nonsense pages. We have a lot of them, because SEO was not on anyone's minds when the framework was built. Galleries, disambigs, years, creators, empty minor Kryptonians with a long-ass powers template but no history... all trash. Then it looks at total percentage of trash pages. If that's high, the algorythms punish the site. And it's already higher than it should be. *So yeah, unless it really needs to be on a page, don't put it there. The same goes for the larger powers templates but that's a larger discussion. :And this is just SEO. UX is almost important (sorry, I'm on a SEO/UX high at the moment). A long list of seemingly random titles with no explanation of their significance that is ON EVERY COMIC PAGE helps absolutely noone. On the off-chance that someone is going to read that list, they would be mystified as to why it's so long. They would need explanations, and we have the Recommended Reading pages for that (which, hey, are GOOD SEO and UX) and for the full list, we have the categories (also better than a manually curated list on every page). But even the previous/sorta current is not ideal: I would not recommend reading the entire Vol 1 or Vol 2 or Vol 3 to understand the character. Not even all of Vol 4, even though that's probably the only really recommended title to understand GL. It's probably better if we link to just five or so storylines, with a link to the Titles and Storylines category added to the bottom. That is, if we need them at all. Sometimes, you've got to update relics, and sometimes, you've got to let go. --[[User:Tupka217|'Tupka']]''217'' 20:22, April 11, 2019 (UTC) ::Makes sense. I used to work in UX myself (albeit before SEO was much of a thing), so I can hardly criticize that reasoning. I admit I'm a bit ambivalent about the idea of biasing so much towards contemporary stories, though: obviously, if you want to understand the context for what's going on in The Green Lantern this month, you're going to get diminishing returns the older any given volume/issue is. But is it actually a safe assumption that someone coming to the wiki is going to be concerned only about recent developments? It's not like DC hides their back catalog, and I imagine it's going to be a bigger and bigger issue as DC Universe rolls out their complete back catalog. That said, I'm not sure that's an argument for expanding the template so much as getting rid of the template entirely and tailoring each article's links as appropriate for that specific article. ::I actually was thinking about doing somethiing with the Recommended Reading pages, but I honestly wasn't sure what was appropriate for that article, either. At present, the Green Lantern Recommended Reading list seems, if anything, even more limited in scope than this template. What I couldn't tell if is it was never intended for anyone interested in, say, Alan Scott's Golden Age adventures, or if it's just a matter of nobody ever bothering to add in anything. But I suspect that's a question better directed to that talk page. —Seancdaug (talk) 21:28, April 11, 2019 (UTC) :I was the one who added the Green Lantern stories from Action Comics and the Flash volumes. Viewing the other RR Templates and not seeing any uniformity I recall adding those two alphabetcally. I don't see why they should be removed they were actual backup stories featuring Hal Jordan not just random appearances. * I would make a few suggestions: ** Create a Template for Hal Jordan like the Guy Gardner RR. ** Rename the current Template Green Lanterns or Green Lantern Corps. ** Or, follow the example of: The Royal Purple Pimp (talk) 09:00, April 13, 2019 (UTC)Royal Purple Pimp talk :Oh god Deadman is way too long. These things generate next to no traffic and foul up a lot of pages. It doesn't have to be complete - that's what an RR page would be for. And most of these recommendations come from an editor's perspective, not from a reader. Hey, read issues so and so... well, maybe they're on Comixology or DC Universe, but why let people waste money on entire series, if 90% of that is just filler, not vital to actually understanding the character. Like I said above, I think it would be better if we limited it to five storylines max and included a link to Titles and and Storylines categories. --[[User:Tupka217|'Tupka']]''217'' 09:43, April 13, 2019 (UTC)